Friday, August 26, 2011

The Hunt for Tony Blair

Comic Strip returns with Tony Blair on the run in Channel 4 film noir comedy

The Hunt for Tony Blair premieres in Edinburgh, with Stephen Mangan as Blair and Jennifer Saunders as Lady Thatcher

John Plunkett

guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 August 2011 19.40 BST

They were the comedy writers who re-imagined the 1984 miners' strike as an action movie, with Arthur Scargill played by an Al Pacino lookalike. Then there was their take on the Greater London Council, with Ken Livingstone portrayed by a fictional Charles Bronson.

Now the team behind Channel 4's Comic Strip have turned their fire on Tony Blair and Lady Thatcher in a comedy timed to coincide with the findings of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.

The Hunt for Tony Blair, which received its world premiere in Edinburgh on Friday, has Stephen Mangan playing the former prime minister in the 1950s-style film noir pastiche. He is a fugitive responsible for a string of killings including the former foreign secretary Robin Cook. And he is implicated in the death of John Smith.

Mangan, who starred in Channel 4's Green Wing and played Dirk Gently in a recent BBC adaptation of the Douglas Adams detective novel, appears in an all-star cast including Jennifer Saunders as Lady Thatcher, Harry Enfield as Alastair Campbell and Robbie Coltrane as the detective on Blair's trail.

Blair takes refuge with Thatcher – played as a cross between Gloria Swanson and Bette Davis – whom he discovers at home watching old newsreels of the Falklands war. The pair are shown sharing a post-coital cigarette. "I'm so in love with you," she tells Blair. "I won my war. You didn't."

Director Peter Richardson, who co-wrote the comedy with Pete Richens, said Mangan's take on Blair bore comparison with Michael Sheen's award-winning take on the former Labour leader in The Deal. "I hope people will forget Michael Sheen after this. He's done a fantastic job," said Richardson.

On the run from the police, Blair tells his wife Cherie: "It's no big deal. I've been charged with murder," and in his desperation turns to his friends for help. But Melvyn Bragg refuses to take his call and Bernie Ecclestone is no help either.

"You couldn't lend me a really fast car, could you?" Blair asks the Formula 1 impresario. "Preferably one without 'Durex' written on the side."

But if Mangan does an admirable take on Blair, then Nigel Planer steals every scene he appears in as an uncannily accurate Lord Mandelson. Asked by police where Blair might be hiding, Mandelson replies: "Tuscany or Florida or Barbados with Cliff Richard."

Richardson said he had been sensitive to the portrayal of real people in the film, including Smith and Cook, who is pushed off the top of a hill by Blair.

"Yes I do worry about Robin Cook and John Smith. There's no suggestion he actually did murder these people; it's ridiculous and not true," he told the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Festival.

"We couldn't do anything about David Kelly, for instance, because it was too real and too serious.

"We deliberately didn't go down that road. Robin Cook was the champion of his cause, he stood up to Blair and we have shown that," said Richardson.

Richardson said he had read Blair's autobiography, A Journey, and lifted some lines wholesale for the screenplay. "There are a few lines in the book which suddenly seemed to fit the film very well. He always mentions his book as much as possible."

He said he "didn't think a great deal" of the former prime minister, and thought viewers would "like to see Tony Blair chased".